She had also been awarded a Marshall Scholarship the same year but turned it down in favour of the Rhodes. She was the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and began her postgraduate study in 1995 at Lincoln College, Oxford. At graduation, she was awarded the John Gardner Fellowship. She earned a degree in public policy at Stanford in 1994. While a freshman, she was outed as a lesbian by the college newspaper when an interview with her was published before she could tell her parents. She is a graduate of Castro Valley High School and attended Stanford University.

Referring to John Hughes films, Maddow has described herself as being 'a cross between the jock and the antisocial girl' in high school. Maddow was a competitive athlete and participated in high school volleyball, basketball, and swimming. Maddow has said her family is 'very, very Catholic' and she grew up in a community that her mother has described as 'very conservative'. Maddow's Canadian mother, originally from Newfoundland and Labrador, has English and Irish ancestry. Her paternal grandmother was of Dutch descent. Her paternal grandfather was from a family of Jews (the original family surname being 'Medvedof'), who arrived in the United States from the Russian Empire. Her mother, Elaine (nГ©e Gosse), was a school program administrator. Maddow, is a former United States Air Force captain who resigned his commission the year before her birth and then worked as a lawyer for the East Bay Municipal Utility District. Maddow was born in Castro Valley, California. Asked about her political views by the Valley Advocate, Maddow replied, 'I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform.' Maddow holds a bachelor's degree in public policy from Stanford University and a doctorate in political science from Oxford University and is the first openly lesbian anchor to host a major prime-time news program in the United States. Maddow has received multiple Emmy Awards for her broadcasting work and in 2021 received a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for her book Blowout (2019). Her syndicated talk radio program of the same name aired on Air America Radio from 2005 to 2010. Maddow hosts The Rachel Maddow Show, a nightly television show on MSNBC, and serves as the cable network's special event co-anchor alongside Brian Williams. The warnings came with an associated explanation: Even if the economy lost jobs in January, it would be a Covid-related fluke, not a reflection of a broader economic downturn.Rachel Anne Maddow ( / Л€ m Г¦ d oКЉ/ ( listen), MAD-oh born April 1, 1973) is an American television news program host and liberal political commentator. The Biden White House this week invested a fair amount of time warning everyone that this jobs report was likely to look pretty ugly. The report also revised the number of jobs added in December, which had previously been reported as 199,000. The economy gained a surprise 467,000 jobs in January, and the unemployment rate stayed relatively flat, rising slightly to 4 percent from 3.9 percent, according to Friday's monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now that we've seen the actual data, we know job creation exceeded all expectations. Because the report was compiled with data from mid-January, when omicron variant infections were peaking, projections ranged from a gain of 250,000 jobs to a loss of 400,000. No one seemed to know quite what to expect before the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest jobs report this morning.

Rachel maddow show january 5 2017